University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Education. / The majority of the world’s learners and teachers of English are located in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts such as Thailand, but related academia, teacher training and textbooks remain for the most part located in English-speaking countries of the Centre. Key assumptions of the latter have been that students wish to enter into the target culture and to work towards native speaker competence; classrooms have consequently reified the native speaking teacher and excluded students’ first language. But in fact, for most EFL contexts such as Thailand, neither those goals nor their associated methods are relevant. This study takes as fundamental to the Thai EFL context the presence of a first language shared by teacher and students, and explores how Thai teachers’ use of both L1 and L2 creates a distinctive bilingual pedagogy. The research takes an ethnographic approach which comprises the observation of ten English classes at a provincial Thai university and interviews with nine teachers on site. The framework for analysis is grounded in systemic-functional linguistics, and integrates this theory of ‘language in use’ with a socio-cultural theory of mind, elements of SLA, and trans-disciplinary perspectives. The study thus seeks to engage with Thai teachers’ voices both as they are heard in the classroom and in dialogue with the researcher. To date, there exist in English no published studies of Thai EFL which have conducted this kind of enquiry. The study produces new ways of describing Thai EFL classrooms. It discusses how L1 contributes to students’ capacity to ‘make meaning’ in L2; how L2 constructs different possibilities of speaker ‘performance’ as well as of speaker ‘reticence’; and how bilingual teachers deal with textbooks which appear exclusively in L1. The study demonstrates that Thai EFL is quite distinct from the ESL domain in which it is usually subsumed, and that on the contrary, it is strongly affiliated with Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) in almost every feature of curriculum, methodology, student participation and teacher bilinguality.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 284-291).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed January 4, 2007). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Appendix C : Language proficiency measures in Hindi. Includes bibliographical references (p. 231-253).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

According to the 2009 U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 57 million individuals, ages five and older, living in the United States spoke a language other than English at home. There is a clear and growing number of bilingual individuals and English Language Learners (ELL) in the United States. With these growing numbers, especially within the school-aged population, it is crucial that a clear understanding exist regarding the development of children who are bilingual or learning English as their second language. There is evidence that bilingual children differ from their monolingual peers in the development of executive function (EF), and specifically demonstrate some advantages on EF tasks. This research has not been expanded to include the new conceptualization of EF as hot and cool. This study seeks to examine bilingual EF advantages in EF in light of this recent conceptualization. A second goal of this study is to identify other psychosocial variables that predict EF in children and, thus, might impact its development. The variables of interest include socioeconomic status (SES), economic stress, parenting practices (e.g., disciplinary practices and relational frustration), and cultural beliefs (e.g., individualism/collectivism). A sample of 67 bilingual and monolingual English speaking children and their parents/guardians participated in this study. Children completed 4 EF tasks and parents completed a battery which included measures of the psychosocial variables and the BRIEF Parent Form. A MANCOVA model was utilized to examine bilingual differences in EF. Multiple regression models were also used to test for significant predictors of hot and cool EF and general EF (as measured by the BRIEF GEC) among the psychosocial variables. No significant group differences were found in multivariate analyses. Significant predictors of specific EF measures and hot and cool total scores were identified, including economic stress, age, relational frustration, vertical individualism, and vertical collectivism. These are discussed in light of current literature and clinical applications.

Bilingual speakers cannot suppress activation from their dominant language while naming pictures in a foreign and less dominant language. Previous research has revealed that this cross-langauge activation is manifested through phonological facilitation, semantic interference and between language competition. However, this research is based exclusively on highly proficient bilinguals. The present study investigates cross-linguistic activation in Swedish learners of Spanish, grouped according to their length of Spanish immersion, and one of the groups is in its very inital stages of learning. Participants named pictures in Spanish in two picture-word interference experiments, one with only non-cognates, and one including cognates. This study addresses the following research questions; (1) do the two groups of participants differ significantly from one another in terms of cross-linguistic activation, (2) what does cross-language activation look like in initial stages of L2 acquisition, (3) how does cognate status affect cross-linguistic activation and does this differ between participants depending on length of immersion? The experiments show that cross-linguistic influence is dependent on length of immersion. The more immersed participants performed very similarly to what is usually the case in highly proficient bilinguals while the less immersed participants did not. The results of the less immersed participants are interpreted as manifestations of lexical processing in initial stages of L2 acquisition. Since this type of learner has never been tested before, there are no previous results to compare to. The results are discussed in relation to the large tradition of offline research which has shown that beginning learners predominantly process their L2 phonologically, and that conceptual processing is something requiring more L2 development. Furthermore, the cognate word induced longer naming latencies in all participants and it turned out that the cognate words were highly unfamiliar. Hence all participants are sensitive to word frequency effects, and this sensitive is greater in early stages of learning. Finally this study suggests that more research must be conducted to establish cross-linguistic influence between the many languages of multi-lingual subjects, even when these languages may not be present in the testing situation.

Thesis (EdD)--Open University.

Thesis (EdD)--Open University.